After Action Report - Sherlock Indomitable, by Brian Rushton
On Sunday, May 13th, Clubfloyd played Sherlock Indomitable (), a parser-based interactive fiction by Brian Rushton.
The game
"And that, Watson, is how I finished the business."
Sherlock Indomitable is a large game in which the player solves crimes as Sherlock Holmes. The game, fully released as part of the Spring Thing 2018 Festival (after its introduction version won IntroComp 2017), is naturally set in Holmes' London, initially in a sanatorium where Holmes is living his last days. Watson brings him one last gift, a book collecting Holmes' cases, and the mind of Holmes wanders back to two specific cases...
From here on, there will be spoilers. If you wish to play the game, you should avoid reading on.
The play
(Unfortunately, the ClubFloyd transcripts have not yet been updated, so I can’t link to this one yet.)
Sherlock Indomitable starts out in the aforementioned sanatorium, introducing the concept of linking two topics and saying these to people. After this short introduction, we wander into Holmes's mind, where we can explore his knowledge, or start one of the two cases - The Speckled Band, and The Six Napoleons (Brian Rushton's plans were originally more involved as seen in his postmortem but ran into technical issues).
All of your old mental paraphernalia for solving cases are here. Useless now, of course.
Since we played the Speckled Band case as part of IntroComp, we opted for playing the Six Napoleons. After some initial confusion about Watson's location and Lestrade's speech, we dove into the case, and were reminded that we do not play only as Sherlock - we also occasionally play as witnesses. In this case, we become the assistant in an art shop where one of the titular Napoleon busts gets destroyed, and a Doctor who had two of those busts, one stolen then destroyed, the second just destroyed.
We had to work through three potential motives - Revenge, hatred, and searching something - to cross off the first two while also investigating a murder linked to the busts, which then lead us to a search through a few London shops and the manufacturer of the busts to gather more clues. This leads to us setting the trap and capturing the culprit (in the process the fifth bust gets destroyed). What is left is filling up the slots of Means, Motive, and Opportunity. (Yes, that is literally a mechanic in this case.)
Means and Opportunity were quickly filled, but Motive gave us trouble. We tried every clue that was left to us, linking them, and looking them up in the relevant sections of Holmes's mind, to no avail.
It was unfortunate, but we had to resort to hints. After a few things we had already deduced and some that mislead us a bit, the last one hit us in the face - we had used the LOOK UP command wrong! We had typed LOOK UP (topic) IN (shelf), when the correct command was just LOOK UP (topic).
In conclusion
You grab Watson firmly by both shoulders and give him a smoldering, passionate, intense look of brotherly friendship, which he returns, as you continue your entirely platonic relationship in your romance-free life.
Overall, Sherlock Indomitable was an enjoyable visit to the world of Sherlock Holmes. Though I'm given to understand that the writing was, for a good chunk, Doyle's (with a couple of changes - the culprit was made American, and from a quick look, it seems they were Italian in the original), this did not diminish my enjoyment of the work, as it is clear that Rushton took great effort to complement the text with descriptions for things that would not be described in the story.
Beyond the frustrating end section, we only encountered few and minor bugs, such as Watson claiming that a witness we had not talked to yet had told us something.
We ended up not replaying the Speckled Band to see what changed in that case, at least at the time that I write this. As such, we did not see what the ending of the full game looks like.
